Hyphens in Command Help Strings

[valneq]

Currently, there are a lot of strings in the English locale of the type "command-help:" that are formatted like

<argument> <argument> - explanatory text

or

- explanatory text

that are displayed after some

/command

and in total render as

/command <argument> <argument> - explanatory text

to help explain the usage of the console.

Crowdin-user "Vainock" pointed out that these hyphens "-" are really bad typographic style and should be replaced by en-dashes "–".
This not only increases the visual distance between command and explanation, but also helps differentiate meaning when the explanatory text itself contains hyphens. The text engine and font used in Factorio should not have problems in dealing with it, since they render more complicated languages just fine.

I believe this should be considered for the English and possibly more locales when doing the polishing work during the 0.18 release cycle, or the latest somewhen in August so it is ready for 1.0 in September.

I started adopting this in the German locale already.

[Dev-iL]

Thank you for pointing this out. In fact, there are about 90 strings that have a hyphen (-) where an en-dash (–) or an em-dash (—) should be.

[Deadlock989]

Crowdin-user "Vainock" pointed out that these hyphens "-" are really bad typographic style

As you say, this is a style issue and therefore literally subjective.

It's fine to make grand statements like this if you are publishing a newspaper broadsheet or an 18th century crop rotation almanac.

But this is a computer game in 2020. It has its own style.